Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Japan agreed with central banks of the United States, Britain and Canada as well as the European Central Bank to jointly intervene in the currency market, the first joint action in over a decade.
The dollar jumped nearly 3 percent on the day to as high as 81.48 yen, extending a rebound from a record low of 76.25 yen plumbed on Thursday. The selloff in the previous session came after a break of the 1995 record low of 79.75 triggered a cascade of automatic sell orders in thin trade.
The yen has climbed steadily since last week's earthquake, as Japanese and international investors closed long positions in higher-yielding, riskier assets such as the Australian dollar, funded by cheap borrowing in the Japanese currency.
Expectations that Japanese insurers and companies will bring money home to pay for claims and reconstruction also contributed to the yen's strength.
Some analysts doubted any intervention would be effective, given past experiences by the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank.
"Intervention is no panacea. Everyone knows it. Japan has a much bigger credibility problem and that'll weaken the impact," said David Gilmore, a partner in FX Analytics in Essex, Connecticut.
"I don't think we've seen the low in the dollar/yen. There's still a lot of carry trade exposure. The world is really levered up on this."
Yet, other analysts said intervention may be more effective this time than it was in September when Japan spent $26 billion to weaken the yen but failed to ensure a lasting dollar rally.
"This entire move can be pinned down to speculative positioning rather than any repatriation flows," said Lee Hardman, currency economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.
"Since it is speculative, intervention in this case should work and clear out some of the long yen positions."
Currency Interventions Never Work
Several people asked me to comment on this. I am not sure what I can add given my stated position that "currency interventions never work".
However, to add some color, I will say this is an act of desperation as well as a sign of hubris by central bank clowns to think they are more powerful than the markets.
Short of complete self-destruction, no one can defeat the primary trend. They can slow it down, or temporarily buy some time but not reverse it.
That said, central banks certainly can enhance the current trend. Indeed, asinine policies by the Greenspan Fed certainly made the housing bubble much larger than would have happened otherwise.
Thus, there is always a slight chance that by accident, central banks step in at precisely the right time (as a trend is about to reverse on its own accord), giving the appearance of intervention success.
Could this be one of those rare instances central bankers step in at the right time? I suppose so.
Currency intervention has not worked ever. Pray tell what good did it do Japan to throw $25 billion at the Forex market in September?
The answer is none.
History has proven time and time again that fighting currency trends is futile. Thus, the best thing Japan can do with the Yen is to not do anything at all. Yet, foolish cries for intervention still persist.
If that gap fills quickly with no intervention from the Bank of Japan, the blast higher is quite likely to be an exhaustion gap, signifying the end of the trend.
Clearly the jackass central bankers did not listen. Thus we have a completely distorted chart as shown below.
Yen 20-Minute Chart
click on chart for sharper image
Hallelujah?
Is this a trend change? How the hell does anyone know? I don't. What I do know is the G-7 intervention has distorted the market, potentially sending false signals that cannot possibly do any good.
However, if you want a guess, we have seen the highs for this move in the Yen.
Moreover, and ironically, my bet is we see intervention in the reverse direction in years to come as Japan struggles to fight rising inflation with a debt-to-GDP ratio ill-equipped to handle interest rate hikes to stabilize the Yen.
A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
A microsecond is a millionth of a second.
"By changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds," Gross told SPACE.com in an e-mail. More refinements are possible as new information on the earthquake comes to light, he added.
The scenario is similar to that of a figure skater drawing her arms inward during a spin to turn faster on the ice. The closer the mass shift during an earthquake is to the equator, the more it will speed up the spinning Earth.
The initial data suggests Friday's earthquake moved Japan's main island about 8 feet, according to Kenneth Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake also shifted Earth's figure axis by about 6 1/2 inches (17 centimeters), Gross added.
The Earth's figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis in space, which it spins around once every day at a speed of about 1,000 mph (1,604 kph). The figure axis is the axis around which the Earth's mass is balanced and the north-south axis by about 33 feet (10 meters).
"This shift in the position of the figure axis will cause the Earth to wobble a bit differently as it rotates, but will not cause a shift of the Earth's axis in space – only external forces like the gravitational attraction of the sun, moon, and planets can do that," Gross said.
This isn't the first time a massive earthquake has changed the length of Earth's day. Major temblors have shortened day length in the past.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile last year also sped up the planet's rotation and shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. The 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004 shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds.
See the article for more details including a map of all the aftershocks.
Here is a brief update of recent nuclear reactor news from Japan, some of it on the lighter side including a look at naturally occurring radiation from bananas and Brazil nuts, and a humorous video of "Nuclear Boy" used to explain radiation to kids in Japan.
Japan Churns Through 'Heroic' Workers Hitting Radiation Limits
More workers were drafted for the frontline of Japan's biggest nuclear disaster as radiation limits forced Tokyo Electric Power Co. to replace members of its original team trying to avert a nuclear meltdown.
The utility increased its workforce at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant to 322 yesterday from 180 on March 16 as it tried to douse water over exposed nuclear fuel rods to prevent melting and leaking lethal radiation. Levels beside the exposed rods would deliver a fatal dose in 16 seconds, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety instructor.
An hour's exposure in some areas equates to half the annual maximum level, said John Price, a Melbourne-based consultant on industrial accidents and former safety policy staffer at the U.K.'s National Nuclear Corp.
"They have an access time of 10 to 25 hours at the most," Price, 60, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "At that rate, you are going to go through workers very fast."
Radiation exposure levels are measured in millisieverts. Exposure totaling 100 millisieverts over a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is evident, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. The cumulative maximum level for nuclear workers was increased to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts by Japan's health ministry on March 15.
"Once they have reached that limit, they can't go in the plant anymore," Price said. "You shouldn't be doing that sort of work ever again."
"What we are seeing now is, really, heroics," said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp., a nuclear consultancy in McLean, Virginia.
The on-site team is likely foregoing sleep and food, and working with minimal light as levels of radiation rise, according to Gennady Pshakin, a former International Atomic Energy Agency official.
"They are like the Spartans, standing up against all that's thrown against them," said Pshakin, who has worked in the nuclear industry for 40 years, referring to the people of ancient Greece who fended off military attacks for centuries. "They are probably working on thin air," he said by phone from Obninsk, the site of the world's first nuclear power plant.
High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant
Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan's nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country's stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said.
The Japanese efforts focused on a different part of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 140 miles northeast of here, from the reactor — No. 4 — depicted in Washington on Wednesday as presenting a far bleaker threat than the Japanese government had offered.
The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium.
Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. The Japanese authorities also expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred.
After the military's effort to cool the spent fuel atop the reactor with fire trucks, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said it was too early to assess the success of the attempt.
Mr. Nishiyama also said that radiation of about 250 millisievert an hour had been detected 100 feet above the plant. In the United States the limit for police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers engaged in life-saving activity as a once-in-a-lifetime exposure is equal to being exposed to 250 millisieverts for a full hour. The radiation figures provided by the Japanese Self-Defense Force may provide an indication of why a helicopter turned back on Wednesday from an attempt to dump cold water on a storage pool at the plant.
Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors is now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants — Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while Chinese nuclear reactors send them to a desert storage compound in western China's Gansu province. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the power plant.
Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves. The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site.
That is in addition to 400 to 600 fuel rod assemblies that had been in active service in each of the three troubled reactors. In other words, the vast majority of the fuel assemblies at the troubled reactors are in the storage pools, not the reactors.
Now those temporary pools are proving the power plant's Achilles heel, as the water in the pools either boils away or leaks out of their containments, and efforts to add more water have gone awry. While spent fuel rods generate significantly less heat than newer ones, there are strong indications that the fuel rods have begun to melt and release extremely high levels of radiation. Japanese authorities struggled Thursday to add more water to the storage pool at reactor No. 3.
Four helicopters dropped water, only to have it scattered by strong breezes. Water cannons mounted on police trucks — equipment designed to disperse rioters — were deployed in an effort to spray water on the pools. It is unclear if they managed to achieve that.
Nuclear engineers around the world have been expressing surprise this week that the storage pools have become such a problem. "I'm amazed that they couldn't keep the water in the pools," said Robert Albrecht, a longtime nuclear engineer who worked as a consultant to the Japanese nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the 1980s and visited the Fukushima Daiichi reactor then.
Very high levels of radiation above the storage pools suggest that the water has drained in the 39-foot-deep pools to the point that the 13-foot-high fuel rod assemblies have been exposed to air for hours and are starting to melt, he said. Spent fuel rod assemblies emit less heat than fresh fuel rod assemblies inside reactor cores, but the spent assemblies still emit enough heat and radioactivity that they must still be kept covered with 26 feet of water that is circulated to prevent it from growing too warm.
Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made the startling assertion on Wednesday that there was little or no water left in the storage pool located on top of reactor No. 4, and expressed grave concern about the radioactivity that would be released as a result. The spent fuel rod assemblies there include 548 assemblies that were only removed from the reactor in November and December to prepare the reactor for maintenance, and may be emitting more heat than the older assemblies in other storage pools.
Even without recirculating water, it should take many days for the water in a storage pool to evaporate, nuclear engineers said. So the rapid evaporation and even boiling of water in the storage pools now is a mystery, raising the question of whether the pools may also be leaking.
Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator who worked 13 years at three American reactors, said that storage pools typically have a liner of stainless steel that is three-eighths of an inch thick, and they rest on reinforced concrete bases. So even if the liner ruptures, "unless the concrete was torn apart, there's no place for the water to go," he said. ...
I cannot assess the accuracy of any of the claims made by Gregory Jaczko. However Tokyo Electric disputes claims by Jaczko. Moreover, Japanese officials are particularly upset with the evacuation area set by US officials at 50 miles while theirs are set at 12 miles, a radius Japan considers more than sufficient.
"Recriticality" the New Buzzword
Tokyo Electric said this week that there was a chance of "recriticality" in the storage ponds – that is to say, the uranium in the fuel rods could become critical in nuclear terms and resume the fission that previously took place inside the reactor, spewing out radioactive byproducts.
Mr. Albrecht said this was very unlikely, but could happen if the stacks of pellets slumped over and became jumbled together on the floor of the storage pool. Tokyo Electric has reconfigured the storage racks in its pools in recent years so as to pack more fuel rod assemblies together in limited space.
If recriticality occurs, pouring on pure water could actually cause fission to take place even faster. The authorities would need to add water with lots of boron, as they have been trying to do, because the boron absorbs neutrons and interrupts nuclear chain reactions.
If recriticality takes place, the uranium starts to warm. If a lot of fission occurs, which may only happen in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion may then scatter the molten uranium.
In short, if the water in the storage ponds is gone, no one seems to be able to explain it. There are conflicting reports as to whether the water is gone and how much, as well as conflicting reports as to whether or not water itself without boron may in some cases do more harm than good.
I am certainly not qualified to sort this out, I can only present the various opinions as I see them, ignoring the ones that are obviously hype, as best I can.
How Japan Explains Radiation to Kids
On the lighter side of the news, Japan uses videos of "Nuclear Reactor Boy" and "poop" to explain radioactive toxicity. I picked this video up from Mike in Tokyo Rogers. Those not speaking Japanese will have to follow the captions.
URL in case above inline video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aH2-MhEko&feature=player_embedded
A banana equivalent dose (BED) is a concept to place in scale the dangers of radiation by comparing exposures to the radiation generated by a common banana.
Radioactivity is measured in disintegrations per second (dps), in Curie (Ci), or in Becquerel (Bq). Radiation dose equivalent is measured in Roentgen equivalent man (rem) or in Sievert (Sv).
Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the radioactive potassium-40, or 40K they contain. Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.
A medium sized banana contains about 450 mg of potassium. 0.0117%, or about 53 μg of this being 40K. 53 μg of 40K produces 14 radioactive decays per second (dps), or 0.00037 μCi of radiation. If the banana is eaten, the dose equivalent is about 0.01 mrem. 0.01 mrem is equivalent to 0.1 μSv.
A radiation dose equivalent of 100 μSv (10 mrem, or 1,000 BED) increases an average adult human's risk of death by about one micromort – the same risk as eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, or of smoking 1.4 cigarettes.
Comparison to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl
After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the NRC detected radioactive iodine in local milk at levels of 0.74 Bq/l (20 pCi/l), much less than an equivalent quantity of normal banana. Thus a 12 fl oz glass of the slightly radioactive milk would have about 1/75th BED. However, radioactive iodine is exceptionally dangerous to children as it concentrates in the thyroid.
Following the Chernobyl disaster, levels of caesium-137 increased by more than tenfold throughout Europe, and wild mushrooms in the area contained radiation with up to an effective dose of 20 μSv/kg[8]. Thus, eating 1 kg of these mushrooms would have given the same dose as about 200 bananas.
Other foods
Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 0.4 mSv (40 mrem or 4,000 BED) per year on average, or more than 10% of the total dose from all natural and man-made sources.
Some other foods that have above-average levels are potatoes, kidney beans, nuts, and sunflower seeds. Among the most naturally radioactive foods known are Brazil nuts, with activity levels that can exceed 444 Bq/kg (12,000 pCi/kg).
Fears of radiation hitting the US are way overblown.
Here is an interesting set of charts on labor pool statistics and housing courtesy of my friend Tim Wallace. First consider a chart of various civilian population numbers.
Civilian Population, Workforce, Employment
click on chart for sharper image
Points to Consider
The civilian population is steadily rising. However, none of that increase in recent years is looking to buy a home.
Those not in the labor force are not looking
Those unemployed are not looking
Those afraid of losing their job are not looking
Those in a house and underwater are not looking
Those just out of school and deep in school debt are not looking
Those facing retirement may be looking to sell or downsize
Mortgage standards are much tighter for those who are looking
New Home Sales
click on chart for sharper image
Those struggling to understand why home sales are so bad and why they are unlikely to improve much soon, need only consider the previous set of bullet points.
Annualized New Home Sales to Civilian Labor Force Ratio
click on chart for sharper image
Tim Wallace writes ...
Hello Mish
The numerator in the above chart is the government-reported number of new homes sales annualized from the monthly report. I track it all year long.
I then chart new home sales against the jobs report number for current people in the labor force.
I use the annual data for the preceding years and the current month data for the current year. I use not seasonally adjusted data because I am always looking year on year.
I do this report for two reasons:
I believe the labor force is the pool for new homes, and as there is no growth. In fact, there is shrinkage.
I also see new homes as a way of increasing labor demand. As there are few new homes being produced I do not see an increase coming in the labor market. Thus, the two negatives feed each other.
People do not realize how much of our economy depends on the housing market.
Think of 1,000,000 homes sold in the mid '00's at an average of $290,000 each and you have $290,000,000,000 in GDP.
Today we are down to $200,000 homes and 284,000 of them. That is $56,800,000,000 in GDP, a decrease of $233,200,000,000 plus whatever multiplier, if any, you want to assign to that.
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